Accelerando

Manfred Macx lives in near-future Amsterdam and calls himself a venture altruist: he hands out business ideas for free, and does it faster than the law can respond. His ex-partner Pamela is after him for back taxes. His robotic cat Aineko is quietly getting smarter than it admits.

Then a message arrives from an alien router, and a colony of lobsters with scanned brains enters the picture. Manfred's modest schemes grow into something far bigger than he planned.

The book follows one family across three generations as the technological Singularity arrives. Manfred's daughter Amber grows up as wealth and intelligence stop meaning what they once did. Her son Sirhan lives to see the inner solar system dismantled by posthuman minds and rebuilt as an enormous computing structure.

This is hard science fiction built from nine novelettes and novellas. They first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction between 2001 and 2004 and were gathered into one novel in 2005.

The book took the 2006 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and it also made the shortlists for the Hugo, the Arthur C. Clarke and the BSFA prizes. The pace is fast and the ideas are dense, with running jokes about economics, law and minds that run on someone else's hardware. Readers are dropped in at speed.